nd chill; and the
Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view
as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray,
that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The
bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level
Orkney Islands, impressed everywhere, on at least their eastern coasts,
by the comparatively tame character borne by the Old Red flagstones,
when undisturbed by trap or the primary rocks, demand the full-dress
auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent.
Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and
surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long
dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and
there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I
afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they
shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according
to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for
centuries after their first discovery, I would rather have been
disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated
so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for
Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the
passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious
schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine
dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was
pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an
unintermittent hot-water _douche_ of queries, the patient courtesy of a
Member of Parliament on a visit to his constituency. At length, however,
the troubler quitted him, and took his stand immediately beside me; and,
too sanguinely concluding that I might take the same kind of liberty
with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I
addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the
schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such
sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met
with a prompt rebuff, that at once set me down. I was evidently a big,
forward lad, who had taken a liberty with the master. It is, I suspect,
scarce possible for a man, unless naturally very superior, to live among
boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while